Command-line interface

The Graphite CLI fully integrates with Git. We simplify the process of trunk-based development and manage dependencies to enable stacking. Under the hood, we’re running Git to create branches, commits, and metadata, which means you can still use Git in your scripts, tooling, or whenever you feel like it.

A stack is a series of dependent code changes. Graphite represents each change in a stack as a branch, which will be submitted as a pull request. To create a branch with Graphite, touch a file, and then run gt create. To create a stack, do that again.

Once you have a stack, you can visualize it using gt log. For an abridged version, try gt log short.

To move along the stack, you can use gt up or gt down to go up and down the stack. If you want to navigate somewhere else entirely, try gt checkout.

Once you’ve created your stack, you may need to iterate on branches that now have dependencies. Graphite makes it painless to update your stacked changes by rebasing any dependent branches for you when you make changes:

1. 1. Check out the branch to update
2. 2. Update your files
3. 3. Amend the commit on your branch with gt modify (or create a new commit with gt modify --commit).
4. 4. Graphite will automatically rebase any dependent branches for you

Like creating a stack, you can also use Git to update any PRs with dependencies. If you do so, you can run gt restack to automatically rebase any dependent PRs.

Rebase conflicts

If you run into rebase conflicts during a restack, Graphite will drop you into the same conflict resolution state you might be familiar with from Git. Once you have resolved your conflicts, run gt continue to intelligently apply that resolution to any dependent branches and continue with the rebase.

To create or update GitHub pull requests (PRs) for your stack, run gt submit. This will detect which branches need new PRs (and which ones have PRs which need to be updated), and ask you for a title and body for each PR, pulling in your preferred text editor and PR template.

Note: To submit, you need to have authenticated with Graphite.

Once you merge a PR, you can use gt sync to clean up the branch locally and update any dependent branches to depend on trunk (which now includes your changes).

Use commands like gt move and gt reorder to change the order of branches in your stack. If you ever end up with a whole lot of code and want to split it into multiple branches, you can use gt split.

If you ever need to checkout a teammate’s stack, use gt get.